David Smith (Bean, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We come into this House and often hear from the leadership double act—the Treasurer and the Prime Minister—about what cunning plans they have for the economy. Truly, the Treasurer is the Baldrick of this government and the Prime Minister is Blackadder. With the performance from the member for Mackellar we have a pretty good candidate for George as well.

Baldrick and Blackadder would get into all sorts of scrapes, whereupon the hapless Baldrick would suggest he had a 'cunning plan' that would somehow get the dynamic duo out of a mess of their own making. As other speakers have eloquently put it, the lack of leadership from the Treasurer and Prime Minister is responsible for the parlous state of our economy. They are the architects of what was a flatlining economy before the summer commenced and before the challenges of bushfires and now coronavirus. Australian families, workers and businesses were already counting the cost of this government's inaction and ineptitude.

As well as other economic problems, those opposite are the key architects of wage stagnation in this country. This is where they have confidently led by example, ensuring that their own workforce—the Australian Public Service and the broader Australian government workforce—has been restricted from genuine pay increases for the duration of this Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison government. They have supported penalty rate cuts across the hospitality and retail sectors, ensuring that tens of thousands of Australian workers and their families have had significantly thinner pay packets and tighter budgets not offset by tax cuts. Yes, they are the architects of wage stagnation, as the finance minister has previously crowed. They have paired those penalty-rate cuts with a raft of anti-union legislation. There has been close to silence on the case for minimum wage rises—although they were pretty fast to claim credit for decisions made by the Fair Work Commission, when it suits—let alone the failure to act on Newstart. They've relied on an endless series of fantasy based forecasts that wages growth was about to surge. The constituents of Bean are still waiting for that surge to happen. The end result is that Baldrick and Blackadder have trapped us in a low-confidence vortex of their own making. That has been their cunning plan.

And then we have the Reserve Bank cutting the cash rate again today. They have cut this to just 0.5 per cent. That's a mark of some economic success! Those opposite set the bar. They said, 'Judge us by our economic management.' Well, on multiple fronts, they are failing, and it's because they have no plans, no targets, no push for wage growth that is credible. The Reserve Bank have today passed their judgement. We are well beyond emergency levels, to a record low. It is a new low for the cash rate and a new low for this government's economic credibility. As noted by those before, today's decision represents the fourth interest rate in 10 months, leaving the cash rate close to zero, only one-sixth of what it was through the depths of the global financial crisis.

The absence of economic leadership and an economic plan have left Australians dangerously exposed to economic risks. In his statement today, the Reserve Bank governor highlighted that unemployment has increased and that subdued wages growth is not expected to pick up for some time. While the coronavirus will have a substantial economic impact, it doesn't explain or excuse seven years of economic mismanagement and underperformance under this government. It doesn't excuse the $8.1 billion, as outlined by one of Australia's great financial journalists, Michael Pascoe, that has come from politically rorted federal programs—programs focused on election outcomes rather than economic or community benefit. We know that that's what their real cunning plan was.

This isn't a Richard Curtis comedy; it's a tragedy. Put all too simply and all too disappointingly: for working people and small business in my community of Bean, the government has failed to adequately support the economy, and it's time to stop taking Australians for mugs.

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